One of the best parts of working in the hospitality and events industry is seeing such a wide variety of events throughout our centers nationwide. Every month, Smart City Networks likes to take a brief look at a few of the fantastic shows featured at our partnered convention centers and celebrate their creativity and success. March was certainly a doozy of a month packed with muscles, flowers, natural products, and did we mention muscles? Let’s get started!
ARNOLD SPORTS FESTIVAL
The Arnold Sports Festival is an annual tradition at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Ohio. It’s an incredibly popular event that features over 12,000 athletes strutting their stuff on stage and performing otherworldly feats of strength and endurance. These individuals definitely drank their milk and ate their cheerios growing up, as even their muscles’ muscles have muscles. These Greek Gods incarnate spent the Arnold Sports Festival benching, breaking, throwing, and lifting all sorts of heavy objects that would crush the arms of any average person. They sent everyone watching into a personal crisis about how much time they were spending at the gym.
It was an amazing experience topped off by an appearance by the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Smart City Networks did not participate in any strong-man competitions, but we still got to flex our muscles a bit. We used our expertise and experience to deliver our standard game-changing technology solutions to ensure the event was as successful as possible. Okay, we’ll start lifting weights right now to prepare for next year’s event!
HOME AND GARDEN SHOW
All that testosterone and adrenaline has us amped up! We need to cool down a little bit, and what better way to decompress than to stop and smell the flowers? The Minneapolis Home and Garden Show is one of the nation’s largest home and garden shows, and it took place at the Minneapolis Convention Center in early March. Smart City loves Home and Garden shows! They’re a chance to showcase the tranquility and beauty of the great outdoors in one place. This year was no exception. Garden enthusiasts were in paradise as they ogled incredible displays and were inspired to start their own home projects!
Smart City sees a convention center as its very own garden, and every event is its own unique flower. It takes time, commitment, and passion to help the flower bloom to its fullest potential, and that dedication to events is why Smart City continues to be the leading voice in our industry.
NATURAL PRODUCTS EXPO WEST
Finally, let’s turn our attention to a few natural products! Informa Markets’ Natural Products Expo West was held at the Anaheim Convention Center in March. It populated the entire facility, with tens of thousands of new products on display. This event is the natural and organic industry’s largest annual event and features a wide range of new health foods, different supplements, and other wellness products. People take their health seriously, and this event brought in over 67,000 attendees with more than 3,000 exhibits. That’s significant because that number is a massive increase over 2022’s attendance and exhibitor count.
Since we returned to normal, we have been experiencing considerable spikes in attendance across the nation, and we are so thrilled to be providing services to all these stellar events. For this Expo, the onsite team at the ACC installed wired, wireless, and telephone services for a large number of exhibitors on the show floor and meeting rooms. We can’t wait until they return next year! Stay healthy out there!
Happy March, everyone, and here’s to an even better April! To the top! (And in case you missed them, be sure to check out our previous Month in Review right here!)
